Thanks to fortuitous geography, the material that William Taylor
discovered at the foot of Moore Park Ravine while staking out a fence
for a paper mill in 1882 was absolutely perfect for construction. Within
a few years, a small divot in the ground had evolved into a full-scale
quarry and production facility turning out hundreds of thousands of
bricks every day.

If right now you're sitting in a building built before the second
world war, there's a chance the walls came from the Don Valley.

Don
Valley bricks were the final step in a 400 million year process. Long
before human history began, a tropical ocean covered what is now
Ontario. Over eons, the weight of the water compressed the soft mud of
the ocean floor into shale, a fine-grained sedimentary rock.

In 1892, while working at Todmorden Mills,
his father's paper factory, William Taylor was digging holes to support
a fence around the edge of the property when his shovel turfed up a
lump of good quality clay. Clearly a shrewd businessman, Taylor took a
sample of the material to another brick works in Toronto to have it
tested.
As
you've probably guessed, the bricks were good. Within five years Taylor
and his two brothers, William and George, had secured the land and
started the Don Valley Brick Works and quarry to capitalize on his
discovery.

As the business grew, the Don Valley Pressed Brick Company produced
three types of brick: "soft mud," a mix of clay and river water, "dry
press," moulded shale, and "stiff mud," a mix of clay and shale with
water. The Taylors' company was the only one to produce all three types
of brick at the same time Canada. The quality was considered so high
that the bricks won prizes at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and 1984
Toronto Industrial Fair. Shortly after, in 1901, the Taylors sold the
business to their brother-in-law, Robert Davies.

Production steadily ramped up in the early part of the 20th century, partly in response to the destruction caused by the great Toronto fire of 1904 and the new laws that followed prohibiting the use of combustible construction materials.

By
1907, the packed kilns were turning out 85,000 to 100,000 bricks each
day. Once cooled, the building material was loaded onto rail cars or
carted out of the valley using Pottery Road. Around this time the
"valley" chimney, the only one still standing, was constructed to vent
one of the kilns.

The company changed hands several more times and production
eventually reached a peak of 25 million bricks a year. In the 1920s,
Geologist A.P. Coleman used the walls of the excavated pits and fossils
gathered by workers to help trace much of the area's glacial history
through the various layers of rock, producing his book Ice Ages, Recent and Modern in 1926. In the second world war, the factory employed prisoners of war housed at nearby Todmorden Mills.

Hurricane Hazel in 1954, specifically its aftermath, was a defining
moment in the history of the Don Valley Brick Works. To improve safety
in the wake of the deadly flooding, the Metropolitan and Toronto Region Conservation Authority
acquired the city's ravine lands including the area around the quarry
and kiln site. Despite a post-war boom, the brick works fell into
decline and finally closed in 1984.

The disused site was first earmarked for residential use but the land
was expropriated in 1987 because of its position on the Don River
floodplain. Unfortunately for the MTRCA, the residential designation
pushed up the value of the land significantly. Over the next few years,
the gaping quarries were gradually filled in using material excavated
from the foundations of Scotia Plaza and landscaped ponds were created
in their place.

In 2010, after decades of dereliction, Evergreen,
a Canadian non-profit organization that aims to connect nature and
people, took stewardship of the site and renovated many of its historic
features. As a reminder of the past, bricks still litter the surrounding
hillside.